While in kenya, continuing our junior studio project,
we kept running into the “problem” of what we
jokingly began to call “Kenyan time.” 3:30pm to us
could be anytime during mid afternoon to people
we had plans with and that planned activates and
meetings were not set as strict as we plan here. It
took us a little while to realize how people planned to
arrive at events and meetings; “lets have lunch then
tea in Ndabibi at 2:15 tomorrow…” now we never
factored in that the person we were meeting may be
traveling from 15 miles away, or farther, on foot or
by truck over “roads,” I put this in quotes because
they were the farthest thing from a road (outside
Naivasha and Nairobi)

People in rural Kenya are not dependent on â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;clock
timeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to survive, aside from children who have to get
up and walk 1, 5, 15 miles to get to school at 8am. In
rural Kenya and especially in Ndabibi the cycles of dry
and wet months are what are necessary to know for
survival.

1

user profiles and stakeholders

“then

on the fifty-ninth

second he opens his mouth

and eats up the time! and you
can’t get it back!”

-dr.

john c. taylor

david smordoni

I wanted to know about movements and how
certain ways of physically measuring time could
benefit various ways of displaying it.
I asked him about watch and clock movements,
his background and basic watch making
methods. I asked him about this because of
his background in the watch industry both as a
designer and as a master watchmaker.
From David I am learning about basic watch
making, from materials to methods of
production.

david is a design director at geneva
watch group, a watch designer, a

master watchmaker and an executive in
the industry

image above

-

orangemagazinetv.com

user profiles and stakeholders

william j. h. andrews

master watchmaker, former apprentice

under charles daniels and longitudinal
sundial designer, he also formerly
worked with the time museum in
rockford illinois

William J. H. Andrews gave the first of the
many lectures of the weekend in Pasadena; the
time of our lives symposium opening lecture,
gave insight to William Andrewâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life in the
horological community.
I was able to talk with him afterwards about
some of the sundials he had been making as
they base their method of time telling in a
similar way to my project by using the suns
light. We also talked about how the sun can be
used to display several other measurements, in
which he had incorporated into his dials some
of which had multiple complications. He was
also a great person to talk with because of his
incredible knowledge of antique watches and
clocks.
Will Andrews also worked as a clock maker
and restorer under Charles Daniels, the master
watchmaker and inventor who created the
double wheel escapement which today many
brands use including F.P Journe, a watch
company which produces some of the most
exceptional modern watches in the world.

both images above

-

hodinkee.com

dr. john c. taylor

a collector of tompion clocks and an
inventor

As John Taylor described to me, “ I hate
modern art, most sculpture, and I find clocks
terribly boring, so I wanted to make a clock
that made time interesting to me.” This was
funny of course, the comment of clocks
boring him, considering he has the worlds
most impressive and valuable collection of
Thomas Tompion clocks and watches. Next he
described to me his corpus clock. “then on the
fifty-ninth second he opens his mouth and eats
up the time! and you can’t get it back!” Taylor
then hit me on the shoulder as he prononced
this. I next told him about my capstone and my
concepts and about my ideas of ambient timing
and saved and spent time as well as personal
and private time.
He was intrigued but as he was busy with many
people coming up and talking to him at the
time for everyone symposium, left me with
one final comment, “there are many ways we
see our time, find what is personal and what
personal means to people.”

image above

-

timeforeveryone.org

user profiles and stakeholders

greg thumm

Greg Thumm is the current president of
Bulova, one of the older and largest watch
companies; they are based both in New York
and Switzerland. Bulova was founded in 1875
in New York and is the company that created
the Accutron, the first electric watch and the
predecessor to the modern quartz watch.
Greg is also the former senior vice president
of Product Development at Geneva Watch
Company and a former senior vice president at
Fossil.
current president at bulova, master
watchmaker and long time industry
executive

image above

-

thechurchillinstitute.org

From Greg I am learning about traditional watch
making methods, materials and how different
materials are used in the watch industry
for more than just aesthetic and also about
movements. I am working with Greg because
he is someone who has had thirty plus years
experience in the industry and I know he will
be of major assistance in helping me learn this
field.

dr. david eagleman

neuroscientist and writer at the
baylor college of medicine

image above

-

watchpro.com

I was able to talk with Dr. Eagleman briefly but
learned quite a lot during his lecture at the
Time For everyone symposium at Caltech.
“Time and The Brain,” focused on the brain’s
perception of time in certain events. His
opening question was, “how far in the past do
we live?” As he explains, the way we perceive
an event is what happens next in what is called
subjective time. Eagleman then demonstrated
how this works. He had an animation of a ring
going clockwise around the projector screen
and at a single point a flash would appear in
the center of the ring. As the flash occurs, we
say it as being half in and half out of the ring.
Though when he does a similar animation where
the ring goes half way around a circle and then
the flash appears inside as it is stopped, we see
it as inside the ring entirely.

user profiles and stakeholders

dr. eagleman’s presentation at the
time for everyone symposium

This he then explained is because it takes the
brain 1/10th of a second to process what
the eye sees, or to perceive the present.
Anything less than 100 milliseconds apart
(non synchronized audio and visual) the brain
will synchronize on its own. This is also shown
how we perceive the present as we blink,
which causes the brain to lose 80 milliseconds
of visual time but not audio. Though the brain
makes up for this by remembering what we
saw before our eyes closed and what we saw
after our eyes opened correcting it for the
loss of those 80 milliseconds. This is a clear
example to show how time and memory are
so intertwined.
Dr. Eagleman’s also covered his research to
find if subjective time can run in slow motion,
in reference to the phenomena of “seeing
your life flash before your eyes” in a near
death experience, also more than this but
why the brain perceives so many details and
slow motion in these events.

time for everyone symposium

The Time For Everyone symposium at The California
Institute of Technology in November featured
lectures and exhibits by designers, watchmakers and
clockmakers, historians of horology, astronomers,
physicists and many other people of different
backgrounds, with a common interest in time.

time for everyone symposium

At the symposium there where twenty-one lecturers;
All of the speakers were leading figures of their field
within the many facets of horology and science
including William Phillips, the 1997 Nobel prize winner
“for development of methods to cool and trap atoms
with laser light,” Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist/
evolutionary biologist at NASA Ames, and John C.
Taylor, a world renowned collector of Tompion clocks
and an inventor and designer who holds a patent for
kettle controls that has over one billion sales to date.
I was also able to talk and discuss ideas with watch
designers and retailers of unusual and exceptional
watches. The weekend overall was extremely
insightful and really opened my mind up to how
many ways time is used and relevant to absolutely
everything in our lives and how to think about time in
ways other than being “on time.”

panel discussion with dr. eagleman,

one of the watches being passed

e.c. krupp the director of griffith

gala, a rgm automatic watch

dr. rothschild, sean carroll and
observatory

around the table at the ending
from a manufacturer in
pennsylvania

Lancaster

time for everyone symposium

an early thomas tompion clock mechanism

an early thomas tompion watch, dated

1681,

with an houring striking bell

and a very early spiral balance spring

2

literature review

moon phase illustration

17th

century?

“we

live in a universe full of
clocks”

-sean

carroll

From J.T. Fraser’s book, time, the familiar
stranger, which is a thirty year long
compilation of work, I have learned of the
dawn of the calendar and the importance
of time for the survival of civilizations with
the use of cycles in farming and also in
religion and belief for making sense of the
celestial sky, which gave way to knowing
when to come to prier. Later in the book
the chronology of the pendulum clock
and mechanical clock and watch is laid
out. With part of the end discussion of
modern clocks, including the cesium atom
clock is this passage; “a clock ticks more
uniformly than does another if the way is
works can convince us it ought to...the
most convincing clock, therefore, remains
the most accurate one until such time that
someone can think of a reason acceptable
to others, why the clock ought not be
accurate.”
Further on away from time telling comes
the psychological aspect of time. at one
point a child makes the discovery of birth,
death and sexuality. “the knowledge of
inevitable passing was then added to the
other elements of the developmental
feedback circuit.” pg 9 ‘The Discovery of
Time’

literature review

â&#x20AC;&#x153;the

knowledge of inevitable

passing was then added to
the other elements of the

developmental feedback circuit.â&#x20AC;?

-j.t.

fraser

The New Everyday, is a very insightful book,
though a decade old now, it brings us to the
core of what ambient technology meant to
the creators of how we view it today and
how they perceived it to play out even fifty
years ahead of where we are now. There is,
in the opening chapter, a table categorizing
the key elements of ambient intelligence;
Embedded, context-aware, personalized,
adaptive and lastly, anticipatory which
would entail a technology that can
“anticipate your desires without conscious
meditation.” The opening remarks on
ambient technology is that the electronics
and other forms of the ambient “technology
would become part of the background
moving the user to the forefront.” There is
so much on, then conceptual and some real,
projects that employ new ways of thinking
of ambient tech and what it really is. The
one project that intrigued me was one
called ‘Garden’. It is a digital garden that
grows as people pass by it, logging in as
they pass through a busy area.
The concept is so inspiring and I see so
much potential for the idea. If in an airport
or busy train station it could be used to
help show the flow of time in a more relaxed
way than stressed travelers, with layovers
and late trains, constantly looking at the
clocks to see what little time has passed as
they wait a four hour layover for their plane
to leave.

literature review

“Ambient intelligent environments will exhibit their
‘intelligence’ in two important ways: through the social
nature of the user interface used, and by the extent
to which the system can adapt itself to its users and
environment.”

-stefano

marzano

chief design officer
and ceo of philips
design

1991-2011

our biological clocks
have predictable
moments

measurement
of predictable
moments

The evolution of accuracy

knowing how you use your time
for example: you know your
most productive at 11 am...it is
predicatble that tomorrow you
will also be most productive at
that time

does entropy make
this idea not true?

Public Time

hour/minute
jumping
movement
cyclic

Christian Huygensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s invention of
the pendulum clock with a fixed
rate of 3,600 seconds per hour
keeps time accurate to an error
of only one minute per day

Clockwork
Man The
Story of Time
Lawerence
Wright, 1968

John Harrisonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creation of the
H4 in 1761 (a marine clock)
that solves the longitude
problem for the British Navy
allowing them to travel more
accurately and with almost no
loss of ships

seasons

weather

day/night
religion

mechanical
visual of the
flow of time
the idea that time
only needs to be
displayed to the
accuracy needed...
workers needing to
show up at 8...race
car driver needing to
keep minute accuracy
with no need for
larger or smaller
measurment and so
on with the examples

Clock Time
World Time

Spent Time

literature review

Personal Time
body rhythms

Private Time

the sensoral garden for travelers
using public transit (airports,
rail, etc.) public art that
travelers contribute to just by
being there, the garden grows
over time (digital displays)
section 8.2 The New Everyday
Emile Aarts & Stefano Marzano,
2003

Circadian clock
pulse
breath

Memory
Experience

Saved Time

linear

arrow of time

Past
present
future
religion

the visual (or other sense)
of the flow of time

perception

Dr. David Eagleman
it takes the brain 1/10th of a second to
process what the eye sees, or to perceive
the present. Anything less than 100
milliseconds apart (non synchronized audio
and visual) the brain will synchronize on its
own. This is also shown how we perceive the
present as we blink, which causes the brain
to lose 80 milliseconds of visual time but
not audio.

natural visual
of the flow of
time

ambient timing

ambient timing can
reduce the stress of
fast paced environments
where travelers/
inhabitants are constantly
concerned with every
second ticking away

events over time shown in
various ways to give what
is needed to the user to
understand: sensoral/multi
sensoral experience

color changes of visual light
as the sun passes across
the sky during the day
Rayleigh scattering/ diffuse
sky radiation - scattered
solar radiation (visable light
in this case) through our
atmosphere giving the sky
its blue hue and why the
sun appears yellow...color
changes as the kelvin temp.
of visable light changes
over the course of the day
plants show a flow of time as they open
and close ( plants have clocks of their
own as well) through Photosynthesis,
they know when the correct amount of
solar light is available during the day.

the natural visual of the flow of
time changes at different times of
the year with the changing of the
seasons and the amount of daily
sunlight

3

precedent and market research

â&#x20AC;&#x153;the

clock, not the steam

engine, is the key machine of the
modern industrial ageâ&#x20AC;?

-lewis

mumford

precedent and market research

Public time is a term that first came about in the
1840s during the great expansion of the railway
systems across the world. Before this idea of public
time, also referred to as standard time and standard
rail time, there was local time. One city could have
multiple times, not to be confused with time zones,
but many different clocks with different times and
not until the railroad became so widely used, did the
synchronization of clocks become important. This
idea of public time is the world time for our global
society and economies but what about our time?

the old orsay station rail station and clock in paris

precedent and market research

Christiaan Huygen’s invention of the pendulum clock,
in 1656, created a 3600 second hour, pushing the
accuracy of time keeping and leading the world
towards an obsession with precision.
On the left are three different clock towers from
very different periods in time, showing that the
modern world has continued to increase its value of
public time to keep it’s cities, religions, and markets
moving. As the English poet Stephen Duck writes,
“time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.”

image above left

-

telegraph.co.uk and christies.com image above right

-

perpetuelle.com

precedent and market research

On the left is the Breguet half hunter case
wristwatch. It has a concealed tourbillon and an
opening to display the twelve-hour dial. This is a very
inspiring design because it allows the user to see
what is most important and then once open it reveals
the mechanism or the other complications that are
secondary or supportive of the visible display.

On the right is the HD3 Slyde watch, a luxury digital
watch that stores several â&#x20AC;&#x153;machines,â&#x20AC;? as HD3 calls
them. The watch allows the user to switch between
several displays of time and movements, including
a tourbillion, a chain driven movement and a classic
skeletonized automatic. This is a very inspiring
piece for it allows the user to change the way they
visualize the physical measurement of time.

image above

-

the new everyday, views on ambient intelligence

precedent and market research

This concept is extremly interesting. It starts with
what the Philips design team called smart â&#x20AC;&#x153;pebbles,â&#x20AC;?
which you are to place on the bedside to create an
experience and set an alarm for when to wake up.
Two dots are to be projected on either side of the
cieling and if you wake in the night the dots get
closer together so you can gauge how long you have
left before your alarm will go off.

image above

-

the new everyday, views on ambient intelligence

precedent and market research

This concept is a digital garden, an ambient form of
seeing time and people passing through a space. It
grows as people, busy travelers in an airport or train
station setting, pass by and add to the garden.

image above

-

johnctaylor.com

precedent and market research

The Corpus Clock, also named the chronophage,
a Greek term meaning ‘time eater,’ is a 4 ½ foot
diameter gold plated sculpture with a creature, this
one is a grasshopper in reference to John Harrison’s
18th century grasshopper escapement mechanism,
that jumps forward to “eat up the time.” It is the first
clock, also patented, to show relative time.

4

project statement

VISUALIZING THE FLOW OF TIME

a map of the suns path across the sky

image above

-

www.griffithobs.org

visualizing the flow of time

Why count small amounts, why be obsessed with it,
why not just let it count up? From the understanding
of time we can give things ages; all of us, reigns of
power, past species, man made creations even the
earth and nearly everything else, or in theory nearly
everything else. From this we know time is, if it
makes sense to say so, was always passing, is always
passing and will always pass. So why measure a life
in numbers from start to finish, why be so obsessed
with counting small sections of our lives? What if it
was accepted that time will just pass, as it has been
and always will?
With all this said and still looking back at time,
as we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t escape it, what are our methods and
perceptions of saving time and spending time and
most importantly visualizing time? How do we all
have a different perception of this and how is it that
we change this perception? How does the complexity
of our culture, our religion, our environment, our age,
our gender and our economic position affect this
perception? Lastly, how can I alter or focus in on
these perceptions?

image to the left

-

an eighteenth century headstone in charleston south carolina

5

project strategy

â&#x20AC;&#x153;a

clock ticks more uniformly

than does another if the
way is works can convince
us it ought to...the most

convincing clock, therefore,
remains the most accurate
one until such time that
someone can think of a

reason acceptable to others,
why the clock ought not be
accurate.â&#x20AC;?

-j.t.

fraser

project strategy

The story of Galileo and the swinging of the
chandelier in the cathedral of Pizza is what I thought
of, thinking about private and personal time. In
Galileo’s findings with the swinging chandelier, he
found that the earth’s rotations could be timed
making the earth itself a clock. He did this by using
his heartbeat, his personal clock, as the comparable
beat to measure the movement.
The earth’s rotations just as our pulse is predictable
much as clock time is, it is a measurement of
predictable moments.
That is what this concept here is. By using the
predictable moments of your pulse you can use
that as a placeholder for seconds to create a time
measurment to “the beat of your life.”

project strategy

My first thoughts about public time verses our time
or private time were to exaggerate the visual of
standard time in an attempt that it would have an
affect on the viewer that would make them more
conscious of their use of time, for example of the
three sketches on the left a dial, either on public
display or on a wristwatch, the unit of measure would
change depending on traffic patters, both road and
foot traffic to elevator congestion, to amount of time
spent in one place, from simply a smooth sweeping
second to a jumping minute or a jumping hour or
even in a case where it made sense to show the flow
of time to seemingly feel that long, a jumping date
only.

Ambient timing

Watching the seconds tick away is stressful.
This is an ambient way of keeping time throughout the day from
dawn till dusk and a digital moonphase or an analog or digital display
at night.
The watch dial displays colors that crossfade and change every hour
as the kelvin temperature of the suns light changes as it moves
across the sky.

Alec Seelig Fall 2013

project strategy

Watching the seconds tick away is stressful.
This is an ambient way of keeping time throughout
the day from dawn till dusk and a digital moon
phase or an analog or digital display at night.
The watch dial displays colors that crossfade and
change every hour as the kelvin temperature of the
suns light changes as it moves across the sky.

project strategy

These are iterations
of the visible light
display watch. The
watch has a domed
face and the color
of the visible light
passes across it
representing the
suns path across the
sky

visualizing the flow of time

The goal of the project is to make a watch that
displays an ambient visual of the flow of time in
place of hands and numbers. This will be achieved by
employing visuals that indicate the time for us in the
natural world.

rayleigh scattering across the horizon seen while in flight above colorado

6

project analysis

There are many facets to my project; I am developing
an understanding and skill of the craft and technology
that are crucial to producing my concept. However
there is more that I still need to learn and I am
reaching out to the people in the various industries
that can help make this a reality.

To complete my project I need to learn more about
programing, which I still need to find someone to
help me with, for the watch display. I am learning
about GPS and how it can be used to guide the way
the display will work. I also am skillful in 3D modeling
in Rhino which is what I am using and will be using
to model the case of the watch, as well as all of
the prototypes. As for understanding material and
further traditional watch making and case making, I
am working with two watch designers, one of whom,
Greg Thumm of Bulova, is an extremely well known
and respected individual in the industry. I am also
looking for manufacturers of tft and lcd displays
capable of the sizing I need for my concept. Currently
Andersdx electronics, based in England, seems to be
the right company to contact.

project analysis

7

timeline

â&#x20AC;&#x153;men

schulde make and use clockis for

to knowe the houris of the dai and nytâ&#x20AC;?

- the bishop of chichester, 1449

time is inescapable as well as

scheduling. this is a timeline to schedule
myself to complete my watch to reduce
the stresses of yours.